I have an MA in English and a lot of time on my hands.

Bug Soup, or Wax Collection Gone Wrong

I was going to harvest pounds of extra wax from our beehive. I was going to have candles for days.

But it wasn’t to be.

Basically, what I did was make bug soup and then throw it away very carefully.

This is my tale of woe.

A while ago our poor spare frames were overrun with wax moth. It’s just what happens when you leave used frames unprotected. I’ve heard that a strong colony will clean up infested frames without a problem, but I didn’t quite have the faith to put it to the test. Instead, I brought them home to salvage the wax.

I pulled all the wax from the frames and got a pretty impressive pile.

My main concern was with filtering the bugs. Because yes, this wax was riddled with wax moth larvae. I decided to melt it down in a pot of water, bugs and all, and filter it in its liquid state.

Beeswax burns extremely easily, so rather than melting it directly on the bottom of the pan, I thought I’d let it dissolve into the water, strain it, and let it separate back out as it cooled.

Simple, right?

As the wax melted, I managed to fit all ten frames’ worth into the pot. After letting it stew for a while, it was time to strain it into molds.

I rubber banded a few layers of cheesecloth over the tops of some plastic containers. In this tiny sample, we can see three gently simmered wax moth larvae.

This was a horrible job. Beeswax sticks to everything it touches and is famously hard to clean up. I was forever setting down cardboard and running out of space and sacrificing utensils.

To make matters worse, it was extremely hot. The pot was hard to handle, and I learned the hard way that some plastic is less heat-tolerant than others.

I finally managed to get four containers full of strained wax water. I set them outside to cool off. The cat went out to investigate and came back wax-dipped.

I left the containers out overnight while I googled how to remove wax from a cat. (If you don’t word your search carefully, you get very different results).

In the morning I went out to investigate.

Oh boy.

One was knocked over. They were all full of rainwater.

And while my hopes of the wax separating and rising to the top did technically play out, it wasn’t all I’d dreamed it would be.

This is it. My entire harvest. It weighs 0.65 ounces.

So what went wrong? I think it was the filtering. While I managed to keep the bugs out of the final product, I kept most of the wax out with them. It all clung together on top of the cheese cloth, and the wax molecules that snuck through with the water were purely coincidental.

A decent amount also wound up on the cat.

If I ever do this again (and to do so will take a tremendous amount of courage), I’m implementing a strict no-bug policy. Maybe there’s a good way to filter them out, but I sure don’t know it.

Ooops. I’m not an expert on this, but I found a technique somewhere using an old slow cooker and have had some success with that. I’ll blog about it eventually but the quick version is this. Put a double layer of muslin over a slow cooker with about 1/2″ water in the bottom (leave some ‘give’. don’t stretch it tight). Put a piece of kitchen towel over the muslin, and the wax on top of that. leave it on low until the wax starts to go down, then add more wax. It’s not quick, and you do get a lot of waste (slumgum), but it comes out pretty clean and you can use slumgum in a smoker as well 🙂 Keep trying and let me know how you get on.